Safe city biking: It can happen

Civil and environmental engineering professor Peter Furth is an avid biker. His goal is to make it easier for everyone else to bike safely around the city. Photo credit: istockphoto.

Cycling can have enor­mous ben­e­fits both for our own health and the health of the envi­ron­ment. Urban areas are uniquely primed to allow com­muters to dras­ti­cally reduce their carbon foot­print by choosing to bike to work rather than drive or even use public trans­porta­tion. But in the United States, fewer than one per­cent of com­muters actu­ally choose this option.

“The number one reason that keeps people from riding a bike is traffic danger,” said Peter Furth, a North­eastern pro­fessor of civil and envi­ron­mental engi­neering in the Col­lege of Engi­neering. “There are other rea­sons like weather and having a bunch of kids to drive around, but the one thing we engi­neers can do some­thing about hap­pens to be the main reason.”

Furth, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Mineta Trans­porta­tion Insti­tute of San Jose State Uni­ver­sity, recently released a research report on the bike-​​related traffic safety of that city.

Peter Furth

The researcher devel­oped a system for clas­si­fying streets by level of traffic stress and found that the main­stream pop­u­la­tion will only accept a mod­erate level of congestion.

“When you ask, ‘Where can that main­stream pop­u­la­tion ride a bike?’ and map it out, you’ll see you can’t get from here to there” without encoun­tering traffic stress, said Furth.

Maps showing only low-​​stress links reveal a large col­lec­tion of low-​​stress “islands” sep­a­rated from one another by bar­riers that can only be crossed using high-​​stress roads. Bar­riers include free­ways and wide arte­rial streets that lack safe crossings.

Cur­rently, roughly 5 per­cent of level two bike riders — those com­fort­able riding on streets with min­imal car traffic — can ride to work without slip­ping out­side their com­fort zone. “We could raise that to 12.5 per­cent with a modest set of improve­ments,” said Furth.

U.S. guide­lines for bikeway design place bicy­cles in the same cat­e­gory as motor­cy­cles, which means that bicy­clists could pedal in traffic along­side motorists. But Furth said this setup would make level two riders rather uncomfortable.

In 1997, Furth took a sab­bat­ical to Hol­land and had some­thing of a rev­e­la­tion. “It was like night and day,” he explained. “They went every­where on a bike, because it was safe to ride a bike everywhere.”

More than 25 per­cent of Dutch com­muters ride to work. And Holland’s bike-​​related death rate is eight times lower than that of the U.S. rate.

So what is Hol­land doing right? “Cycle tracks,” said Furth. Unlike tra­di­tional U.S. bike lanes or bike paths, these are phys­i­cally sep­a­rated from car traffic but still run along the road.

Furth hopes to per­form sim­ilar studies for other cities around the country, including Boston. He is part of the move­ment, he said, to “awaken Amer­i­cans — and espe­cially Amer­ican engi­neers — to the pos­si­bility of safe bicycling.”

About the Writer

Angela Herring is the science writer for the Northeastern news team. In a past life, she made fullerenes (aka bucky balls) at a small chemical company outside of Boston while freelance writing for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Broad Institute and Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes. She earned her Bachelor's degree in chemistry and literature from Bennington College in 2005. In addition to writing stories for the News@Northeastern, she also maintains the university's research blog: iNSolution.

2 comments

I was just in Mon­treal a few week­ends ago. They have, as Furth men­tions about Hol­land, bike lanes that are phys­i­cally sep­a­rated from car traffic but still run along the road (this was espe­cially apparent around the McGill Uni­ver­sity neigh­bor­hoods). It seems like our N. Amer­ican brethren get the idea! EX: http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​B​b​-​k​K​g​K​W​AsQ

I can take the SW Cor­ridor– for me, a fan­tastic path from JP to the back of Ryder Hall– but wouldn’t com­mute by bike without such an option…Too wor­ried about get­ting “doored”

I do accept as true with all of the ideas you have offered for your post. They are really con­vincing and can def­i­nitely work. Nonethe­less, the posts are very short for new­bies. Could you please pro­long them a bit from sub­se­quent time? Thank you for the post.

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